Memory usage of current process in C

Question

I need to get the memory usage of the current process in C. Can someone offer a code sample of how to do this on a Linux platform?

I\'m aware of the cat /proc/

Answer 1

This is a terribly ugly and non-portable way of getting the memory usage, but since getrusage()'s memory tracking is essentially useless on Linux, reading /proc//statm is the only way I know of to get the information on Linux.

If anyone know of cleaner, or preferably more cross-Unix ways of tracking memory usage, I would be very interested in learning how.

typedef struct {
    unsigned long size,resident,share,text,lib,data,dt;
} statm_t;

void read_off_memory_status(statm_t& result)
{
  unsigned long dummy;
  const char* statm_path = "/proc/self/statm";

  FILE *f = fopen(statm_path,"r");
  if(!f){
    perror(statm_path);
    abort();
  }
  if(7 != fscanf(f,"%ld %ld %ld %ld %ld %ld %ld",
    &result.size,&result.resident,&result.share,&result.text,&result.lib,&result.data,&result.dt))
  {
    perror(statm_path);
    abort();
  }
  fclose(f);
}

From the proc(5) man-page:

   /proc/[pid]/statm
          Provides information about memory usage, measured in pages.  
          The columns are:

              size       total program size
                         (same as VmSize in /proc/[pid]/status)
              resident   resident set size
                         (same as VmRSS in /proc/[pid]/status)
              share      shared pages (from shared mappings)
              text       text (code)
              lib        library (unused in Linux 2.6)
              data       data + stack
              dt         dirty pages (unused in Linux 2.6)